


solve for x

by bearonthecouch



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Algebra, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Neglect Technically, Mathematics, Pre-Series, Referenced Dyslexia, School, Teaching and Learning, Very Vaguely Referenced Mental Health Issues, aka Berthold Hawkeye's A+ Parenting, kid Royai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 21:25:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17568200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearonthecouch/pseuds/bearonthecouch
Summary: She was obviously exasperated, frustrated, on the edge of crying or giving up completely. He understood the feeling.“Let me help you.”Riza finally looked up, clearly suspicious. “Why?”“Because you help me all the time, and I’m actually pretty good at this.”





	solve for x

The report card was stuck in between two heavy textbooks in her schoolbag.  
  
Her father rarely asked about school, except for a distracted question once or twice a term, and he’d never asked about her grades. The teachers asked about him, of course, when they needed parental signatures, tuition payments, or to inform him of the date of one of the parent-teacher conferences he had never once attended. Riza’s simple lies were enough to persuade them not to chase after him, and as long as she continued to do well in classes, her home life mattered very little to them.  
  
As long as she continued to do well in her classes.   
  
Her math teacher had been asking her to stay after school for weeks, trying again and again to give her the opportunity to practice the increasingly difficult material and boost the grades that kept slipping on test after test. But every time he held her back after class so he could try to persuade her to accept his tutoring, she just shook her head quietly, stubbornly resisting the offer of help until Mr. Norwood just sighed and flicked his head toward the door, giving her permission to go.   
  
She couldn’t stay after school. She already barely had enough time to scrape a serviceable meal together by the time she got home, even though her father and Mr. Mustang were usually working whenever she got there, and probably wouldn’t notice until after she’d gone to bed that they hadn’t eaten. But she didn’t want to take a chance on ‘probably.’ And she had to take care of her father, because he wouldn’t take care of himself.  
  
School was her escape from all of that; but when she was forced to make the choice, her escape couldn’t be her priority.   
  
She sat in the back of Mr. Norwood’s class and took notes with the same precision and care she did in any other class, but for some reason the foreign language of mathematics didn’t make itself understandable with the same intuitive ease that Latin or Xingese did. The mnemonic devices that all her classmates appeared to be able to navigate without difficulty, like PEMDAS and FOIL, seemed to mix her up more than they helped. And she wound up just making guesses as she glared at the expressions and equations that wouldn’t factor or break down correctly no matter what method she tried.   
  
So she told herself it didn’t matter, that she was still doing fine in history and classic literature and even gym, but that didn’t make the F on her report card look or feel any better. She could forge her father’s signature, she wasn’t worried about that. He wouldn’t be upset with her, that required more effort and care than he had to spare on anything that wasn’t alchemy.  
  
But still, the letter represented a sharp demotion from the worldview she’d spent the last five years coming to understand: her academic strength gave her a kind of buffer against the resigned loneliness and disappointment of her home life. If she was a failure even at school, there didn’t seem to be much point in even going anymore.   
  
She sat down at the kitchen table and dragged her notebooks and textbooks out of her bag. The report card was mixed in with all of that, on stiff yellowish-white cardstock bearing the imprint of both the Amestrian Government and her school seal. She tried not to look at it as she opened her math text and willed the equations that hadn’t made sense for an entire 18-week term to somehow suddenly and miraculously reveal their hidden meaning to her now.   
  
The equations remained unchanged, but she looked up to see Mr. Mustang standing in the half open doorway separating the kitchen from the front hall. “I didn’t know you were here,” he admitted. “You’re so quiet.”

Riza shrugged.   
  
Roy wasn’t even six years old yet when he realized he couldn’t hide anything from Aunt Chris and stopped bothering to try, but growing up with her had also given him a pretty reliable feel for when someone had something they didn’t want anyone else to know.   
  
Not that Riza Hawkeye’s secrets were any of his business.   
  
Still, he sat down in the chair next to hers at the table and waited, calmly. Riza could go days without talking to anyone, he knew, but she usually talked to him before anyone else.  
  
“Won’t my father be looking for you?”  
  
Roy shrugged. They both knew that Berthold was unlikely to pull himself out of his own work enough to care where Roy was, and if he was missing something critical, there would be plenty of time to catch up on it later. “I needed a break,” he said, which was actually mostly true. He had no idea what time it was - late afternoon, obviously, if Riza was here, and when he glanced out the window over the sink a few feet away, the pinks and oranges of the winter sunset were spread through the sky. His muscles were stiff with disuse and his eyes hurt from squinting in dim light, for long hours. And Berthold kept working until it was physically impossible to continue. If Roy didn’t take his own breaks, he’d never get one.  
  
So Riza didn’t push the point, and she didn’t tell him to leave. Instead, she turned back to her homework, wrapping both of them in usually-comfortable silence.   
  
But she was tense, squeezing her pencil tightly and only rarely using it to write something, often erasing it just as fiercely a second later.  
  
“What’re you working on?”  
  
Roy hadn’t been out of school so long that he’d forgotten what it was like, but the kind of classes Riza took were worlds apart from what he’d been offered in the overcrowded, underfunded schools of Central City. Math was math, though, and it was obvious as soon as he glanced at her paper that that’s what she was working on. And struggling with.  
  
Ah. So that’s what this was.   
  
“Are you flunking math, Ri?”  
  
“Leave me alone.”  
  
She was obviously exasperated, frustrated, on the edge of crying or giving up completely. He understood the feeling.  
  
“Let me help you.”  
  
Riza finally looked up, clearly suspicious. “Why?”  
  
“Because you help me all the time, and I’m actually pretty good at this.” When she didn’t answer, he sighed heavily. “Where are you stuck?”  
  
“I don’t know! Everywhere!” She glared at him as if her problems with her homework were entirely his fault.  
  
Roy couldn’t help his small smile.  
  
“Stop making fun of me!”  
  
“I’m _not_ making fun of you. I’m just… I’m actually kind of relieved that there’s something in the world that’s hard for you. It makes you seem like a regular person instead of, well… you.”  
  
Riza huffed and shifted back in her chair as Roy leaned over so that he could see her notebook more clearly. He put a hand on it and pulled  it closer to him before she could protest. The visible numbers and symbols were already triggering mental work, without apparent effort. He pressed his finger down hard on the paper, partially covering the first few sets, a physical marker to stop himself from solving them so he could finish skimming the page:  
  
(3x + 5) (2x + 3)

127 - 2 (3 + 4)2  
  
And a dozen more similar problems in Riza’s neat handwriting. 

Compared to the complex calculations Master Hawkeye has him working through near-constantly, Riza’s basic algebra looked refreshingly simple. But he understood that it wouldn’t seem so to an eleven-year-old. And he knew what it felt like to be berated and made to feel stupid because you couldn’t figure out a supposedly simple task at the same speed as everyone around you.  
  
After the gradual phase-out of oral reading between second and third grade, he’d learned to mask his difficulties with reading and writing, using alternate methods up to and including cheating just to get by. And even then, he was always at or near the very bottom of the class rankings. Sometimes he thought it was only his smile and the ease with which he made friends with most of his teachers that kept him from failing out of school completely.  
  
With Master Hawkeye, it’s different. Sure, sometimes he gets frustrated that Roy can’t keep up with his inhuman pace; Roy can see how difficult it is for him to slow down and have to explain something in pieces small enough for his apprentice to grasp and manipulate and understand. But he’s never shamed Roy for the things he doesn’t know. He’s made him repeat things over and over again, until he does know them, by heart, in his sleep, without thinking. He spent months practicing until he could freehand draw a perfect circle, within seconds if he had to. Sometimes - a lot of times - they stay up all night, testing alchemic geometry and elemental ratios through subtle variations until they hit on the one combination that does what they want it to do. And in those moments, Berthold’s eyes are feverish with excitement, and he looks at Roy and sees an equal.   
  
“Nobody else can do what we can do,” he’d whispered to Roy once, at four-o-clock in the morning. “What I’m teaching you isn’t alchemy, it’s apotheosis.”  
  
Roy had nodded like he understood, but he had to ask Riza what the word meant. When she asked him where he’d heard it and he told her, she looked unsettled enough that he almost took back the question. “It means becoming God,” she told him, quietly. And he understood even less than he had before.  
  
No wonder he needed a break. Master Hawkeye’s intensity teetered on the line between intimidating and terrifying, and Roy sometimes legitimately feared that if he didn’t sometimes force himself to walk out of the lab for an hour or two, he’d forget what a normal person looked like or sounded like, or needed.   
  
“I’m making us some tea, k?” he asked Riza, after he’d already gotten up and started filling the kettle. She just stared at him, which wasn’t a yes and wasn’t a no. Roy hunted through the cabinets until he found a box of old, half-stale crackers. He took a handful and then set the box in front of Riza. “Come on, you can’t simplify expressions if you’re hungry.”   
  
“You work through meals all the time.”  
  
“Which is exactly how I know that it’s a terrible idea.”  
  
Riza reached into the box and took one cracker, then two. She chewed on them while Roy pushed her notebook back toward her and then leaned over the table, pencil in hand. His dark hair was getting too long again, falling into his eyes.  
  
“Okay, look,” he said, using the pencil to lightly draw over the first series of numbers and letters and parentheses. “You start by multiplying _this_ (pushing down on the 3) times _this_ (moving over the the 2x within the second set). 3x times 2x is…”  
  
“6x?”  
  
“6x squared. But you’re close.”  
  
“Except it still doesn’t make sense because I’m supposed to do whatever’s in parentheses first. Right?”  
  
“But you’re combining like terms. You can’t do what’s in the parentheses because you don’t know what x is.”  
  
“How am I supposed to know what x is?”  
  
“You’re not. Yet. I mean, I could show you the quadratic formula but it would only confuse you. The point is, you’re not solving for x. You’re just simplifying.”  
  
Riza raised an eyebrow to illustrate her doubt that anything about this was simple.  
  
The kettle whistled on the stove, and she hurried to get it, because pouring tea was at least something she knew how to do. She took her time letting the tea bags steep in the mugs, until she looked up and realized Roy knew she was stalling. She carried the tea carefully to the table and then slipped into the chair beside him.   
  
Roy sipped at the tea and ate another cracker and then broke the problem down, step by step, patiently diagramming the method with arrows and circling the places where two disparate pieces of the equation could merge together into some different number or combination of numbers and variables.   
  
It still didn’t make sense, but after he’d done it two or three times and then pushed the paper back toward her and told her to try it herself, she found that she could follow the path he’d set and reach the correct result. Sometimes. She made mistakes, but Roy calmly corrected them and made it seem like not a big deal.  
  
“You’re way faster at this then I was at trying to memorize sight words as a kid,” he pointed out.   
  
Riza frowned. She knew he had trouble with reading smoothly or understanding what he read, but to her reading was easy. Words came naturally. And words were important, and everywhere. Arcane equations were different, reserved for people like her father. And Roy Mustang.  
  
“I just don’t see how any of this is important for… I’m never gonna need to know this!”  
  
Roy shifted in his chair, turning so that he could really look her in the eye. He tapped his thumb on the table a couple of times.   
  
“Don’t you change the way you shoot when it’s windy?” he finally asked. He’d gone down to the woods or the backfields plenty of times, watching her reduce old bottles to nothing but shards of colored glass. Even in the heavy gusts of late winter and early spring.  
  
“Yeah. So?”  
  
“So you’re accounting for changing variables. It’s just math. If you wrote it down, it would look like this. Well… kinda like this.”  
  
“But I can just _do_ it. I don’t have to make it look like that.”  
  
“Not _now_. But what if one day, you had to calculate the path of a bullet before you fired it?”  
  
“You can do that?”  
  
“I dunno. Maybe. Probably, if you give me enough time.”  
  
He gave Riza a reassuring smile and returned to the kitchen, fumbling around in the pantry and icebox until he found enough to throw together a meal.   
  
Riza turned around in her chair, watching as he pulled out a knife, a pot, a stirring spoon. He moved around the kitchen with surprising ease, making her wonder if he spent more time in here than she thought, when she was at school, or asleep. “What are you doing?” she asked, halfway between incredulous and accusatory.   
  
Her tone made Roy grin. He was almost laughing, even. “I’m making dinner. You have homework to finish, right?”  
  
“You don’t have to do my job for me.”   
  
“You’re eleven. You don’t _have_ a job.” He plowed forward before Riza could oppose that point, becoming suddenly serious. “Master Hawkeye is as much my responsibility as he is yours.”  
  
Riza was quiet for a long time, so quiet that Roy stopped trying to cook and returned to the kitchen table. “Do you actually think that?” she asked, as he sat down next to her.  
  
Roy shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, I know he’s your father, and I’m not… is it weird? I’m not trying to take him away from you or anything. I’m just trying to help.”  
  
“I know,” Riza said softly. Roy Mustang is the only one of her father’s apprentices who had stuck it out with her father for more than a single summer. He’s the only one who went out of his way to talk to her, too. He’s definitely the only one who made it a point, again and again, to offer his help. And he’s lived with them for more than two years, which is long enough to fully understand what being responsible for her father actually means. And he still takes on that responsibility. Willingly. There’s not even any blood tying them together, no familial obligation. What does it say that Riza would run away from this place in a second, if she could, and Roy could leave any time he wants, and he doesn’t?   
  
She glanced up at him. “You must be extremely desperate to learn alchemy, Mr. Mustang.”  
  
“Your father’s a genius. But even so, I don’t want to be anything like him.” Riza studied his face and nodded slightly, not quite sure what she was agreeing to. But Roy smiled. “Don’t fail math,” he said simply. “We can work out the rest from there.”  
  
Riza spent the rest of the night quietly finishing her homework, and Roy mixed up some of their winter vegetables alongside a few pieces of venison sausage, falling into the easy rhythm of cooking for himself but producing enough for a couple of other people. He’d had free run of the kitchen at home since he was old enough to prove he wouldn’t hurt himself mishandling a knife or trying to light the stove. He set a plate next to Riza, who had either finished or given up on math and sat curled up in the chair with some book of ancient mythology that was probably translated Xerxian or something.  
  
Roy grinned as he watched her, brow furrowed in concentration as she read, and she glanced up and smiled as he took his plate and Master Hawkeye’s and headed for the lab.  
  
As predicted, Berthold neither asked where Roy had been nor inquired about Riza. Roy stuck a forkful of meat and potatoes into his mouth and bent over the half-sketched transmutation circle chalked onto the rough wooden table. Like with Riza’s expressions and equations, his mind had already started running the calculations required to make sense of the symbols and structures he was seeing. He swallowed his food and looked up at his teacher.  
  
“What are you working on?”


End file.
